The thought reminded him of Bat El. A slow smile found its way to Beelzebub's face, tickling the corners of his lips. Laila might have joined Michael. Angor might be dead, and Caesarea lost. But not all was grim. With Bat El around, he might enjoy his stay in this seaside fort.
Beelzebub walked across the fort's hall, kicking aside some broken spears. A few angel bodies still littered the floor, and Beelzebub grunted. "Guys, really, clean up the mess," he said, and several demons fluttered down from the walls to do his bidding. They lifted the bodies and dragged them out from the hall, smearing blood across the floor. Beelzebub grimaced.
Leaving the hall, he stepped into the basement and opened the door. The sound of cackling demons greeted him alongside the stench of bodies. The demons were flapping around Bat El, tugging her hair, pinching her arms, licking her. The young angel was struggling against them, flapping them aside, tears in her eyes. When the demons saw Beelzebub enter, they froze and fluttered into the corners, cowering in the shadows.
"Oh, hell," Beelzebub said. What was wrong with his demons today? He stared into the shadows, the flames from his eyes piercing the darkness. Those demons who had tortured Bat El burst into flame, then fell to the ground, turning to ash. Other demons cowered in every corner, peering at him with burning eyes.
"I told you not to touch her," he said in disgust. Angel bodies still covered the floor, tooth marks in some. The bodies stank. "And clear out these bodies." Like wanton children, these demons were, he thought. You had to watch them every moment.
He knelt by Bat El, who had dropped to her knees, panting. She turned her head aside, as if to hide her tears, and rubbed her fists against her eyes. Her hair fell over her face.
"I apologize for this," Beelzebub said. "Come with me, sweetness. Please. We'll find you a more suitable place to stay."
He tried to take her hand, but she shook him off and rose to her feet. She tossed back her head and began walking upstairs, leaving the basement. She tried to walk steadily, head held high, but could not hide the tremble in her knees. Beelzebub followed, a small smile on his lips. When they reached the main hall, the demons were clearing away the last bodies.
"I found a chamber in the tower," Beelzebub said to Bat El, "with a simple cot, a bible, and a harp. It seems sparse but comfortable enough for now. Would you like to stay there?"
Bat El refused to look at him, staring at the bare wall where once Michael's painting had hung. "That was my chamber before you took this fort."
"Perfect. Mind if I show you there? I wouldn't want you to step into the room and find demons in your bed."
Bat El said nothing, but her face paled, and her fingers trembled before she clutched them. Beelzebub nodded. "Let's go."
They ascended the staircase up the tower and entered the small, round chamber. Indeed, several demons filled the room, playing dice and drinking from bottles of bloodwine. At the sight of Beelzebub, they knelt.
"Leave us," he said, and the demons fluttered out the window, leaving their bottles and dice behind.
"Such dirty creatures, aren't they?" Beelzebub asked Bat El, kneeling to collect the empty bottles and dice. He tossed them out the window and heard the glass shatter in the courtyard. "Not like us angels."
Bat El said nothing. Beelzebub didn't have to be a mind reader to hear her thoughts.
You are no longer an angel.
"Angel, fallen angel, same stock," he answered her thoughts with a wink.
"Thank you for seeing me to my chamber," Bat El said, not looking at him, her voice a study of emotionless courtesy. "Thank you also for freeing me from my tormentors. You may leave now."
"I thought I'd stay and talk for a while," he said.
Still Bat El refused to look at him. "I have nothing to say to you."
Beelzebub sat down on the bed. He sighed inwardly.
What are you doing here, Beelzebub?
he thought to himself.
What do you want here?
Of course, he knew the answer.
Let's face it, buddy. Your wife's a scaly dragon, and you're looking for some consolation with another woman.
Another part of his mind protested, reminding him that he did love Zarel, and that part of his mind was right—yet as much as he loved Zarel, the truth remained. He had not married the archdemon for love. He had married her because Laila had left him, and Zarel was the only other female so mighty and feared.
Beelzebub looked at Bat El, who stood before him, cheeks still flushed, hair draggled, ash and blood still on her pale skin. As beautiful as Zarel was, with her flames and glinting scales, Beelzebub missed the touch of soft skin on a woman.
"Look, Bat El," he said. "I know you hate me now. I can understand that. But I'm not such a bad guy. I did what I had to do here, what Michael would have done in my place."
Finally she met his eyes, her own eyes flashing. "Your brother would never slaughter hundreds of angels like you did today."
Beelzebub raised an eyebrow. "My brother is in Caesarea now, where he slaughtered hundreds of demons. The line between angels and demons is a fine one, Bat El. We're more alike than you've been raised to believe. After a while longer on Earth, you'll learn the truth."
"Which is?" she demanded.
He shrugged. "That not all demons are pure evil like Heaven teaches, and that angels at war can lie, cheat, and murder with the best of them."
"You're a liar," she said, but her voice had lost some of its conviction, and she looked away from him.
It always takes the young angels on Earth some time to learn how shielded they've been in Heaven,
Beelzebub thought.
"Sit down, please," he said, and she sat on the simple wooden chair by the bed. "How is your dad?" he asked. "We used to be good friends, you know—back in the old days when I still lived in Heaven. We would go hunting together." A sadness filled Beelzebub, a feeling like a shudder in a drafty room, not wholly unpleasant but enough to run a chill through the bones. "Those were the days, back before the rebellion." He nodded slowly with a soft laugh. "Gabriel and I, and my brothers, and Lucifer. Oh man, the trouble we'd get into, sneaking down to Earth to run around, drink cheap beer and hunt in the forests. We'd piss off God more than a few times. We were young, wild hell-raisers then. Your dad too."
Bat El nodded. "He told me," she said softly.
Beelzebub flicked a piece of ash off his breastplate. "Does Gabriel miss those days? How times change, don't they? Look at us now. Michael and I—the angelic brothers—him the lord of Heaven's hosts, I the lord of Hell. Your dad—once our partner in crime, now the mature, responsible governor of Heaven. You young angels, born after the rebellion, raised on tales of terror from Hell.... Sometimes I think the younger generation misses the whole point. Other than Laila, that is." He grinned. "Your half-sister hates both Heaven and Hell, and thinks we're both bastards. She's the only one among us with any damn sense."
Bat El stared at him, and her eyes suddenly blazed with such anger, they could almost pass for demon eyes. "I know how you've hurt her. If you hurt her again, Beelzebub, I will kill you."
Beelzebub stood up, walked toward her, and leaned down to kiss Bat El's lips. She turned her head aside, and his kiss landed on her cheek. He caressed her hair with ashy fingers. "I would never harm a fly," he whispered, his lips on her ear, letting just the hint of menace fill his voice. "So be a good girl, Bat El. Don't turn me into a liar."
With that, he spun around and left Bat El in the chamber, locking the door behind him.
* * * * *
As she lay underground, boulders and dirt pressing against her, strange dreams filled Laila, memories more vivid than she had ever known them, crushing her like the rocks. She remembered another time, twenty years ago, when weight had crushed her, trapping her, the weight of grief and guilt.
She was Laila, the only seven-year-old girl nobody ever called cute, the only seven-year-old girl adults feared and shrunk away from. She rarely cried during those years, but the grief always filled her, and her body always found ways into corners where it could curl up, silent, staring with burning eyes.
The old farm had been full of corners and nooks for her to hide in: rickety barns, the coop where chickens always made a ruckus, the shed where three old cows lived. The animals hated her, even more than humans did, shrieking when she walked by, turning away in fear if she tried to pat them. Even Mamma and Papa, the elderly humans who owned the farm, who put out plates of food for her and sewed her dresses, smelled like fear if she came too close. All but Eclipse. Eclipse never feared her.
She had found the puppy behind the farm in the copse of pines. Thousands of wild dogs roamed the Holy Land then, seven years into Armageddon. Some had been pets before the war, before their owners perished in flame; others had been born wild into this battlefield of angels and demons. Eclipse was the size of a potato when she found him, a shivering black thing with a stripe of white along his breast. Laila, the child everybody feared, lifted the puppy from the ground, and he licked her palm.
"You don't fear me," she whispered, tears of blood flowing down her cheeks. She cuddled him against her and named him, and thought that maybe, just maybe, if an innocent puppy could love her, she wasn't so evil and monstrous after all.
She made the puppy a home inside the barn by the cows, so it would have other animals for company. She built him a bed of straw and fed him cow milk from a bottle. When he was old enough, she let him share the food Mamma and Papa laid out for her. She noticed that the old farmers laid out larger portions, and she suspected that they knew of her dog, and wanted to let her keep tending to him herself, in secret.
"See how she tends to the pup," she heard the old farmer whisper to his wife one night, as Laila crept outside their house, kneeling beneath the window. "She has goodness to her; she isn't a demon child."
"She is half angel, half demon," Mamma said. "She is outcast from both camps. Poor child. Let this be a home to her for as long as it can be."
That night, Laila realized that she loved Mamma and Papa, these old farmers who had let her stay in their barn and yard. She had never been inside their house before—she knew how much they feared her—but that night, Laila crept into their home, Eclipse in her arms. They saw her enter the window and froze, staring at her, pale, as if they had seen a ghost. Laila said nothing, but lay down on the rug at their feet, curled up, and went to sleep by the fire. For the first time in as long as she could remember, no nightmares filled her sleep, and she felt as if she had real parents, a true home.
She spent months sleeping on the rug by the fire, silent. Mamma and Papa tried talking to her, tried reading her books, tried teaching her to read and write, but Laila never spoke back. She knew by then that she was half-demon, and she feared that her words could curse the farmers, could bring evil into them. Yet slowly, as they tended to her, gave her dolls and dresses and love, Laila began to feel her angel side. She began to feel like maybe she had beautiful angelic light within her, a goodness to her soul that came from Heaven, that could shine upon anyone who loved her. When she finally spoke to Mamma and Papa, her first words were, "I love you."
Half a year after she found Eclipse, several bedraggled children came to the farm, barefoot orphans seeking food. They came as beggars to the door, bellies empty, faces ashy. Laila and Eclipse were huddling under the staircase, reading from a book, peering out of the shadows.
When Mamma opened the door to the orphans, Eclipse began to growl. He was a large dog by then, larger than Laila, with sharp fangs, and the farmhouse was his territory. "Hush, Eclipse!" she said to him, but he would not stop growling. When the orphans stepped into the house, Eclipse barked and broke free from her grasp. He leapt toward the orphans and bit one's leg, drawing blood. The child screamed, as did Laila. When she rushed forward to save the orphan, the children froze. They stared at her, pale, eyes wide and teary. Her bat wings were unfurled, her eyes burned, and her halo of fire crackled above her head; even Mamma gazed at her in terror.
Laila grabbed Eclipse's collar and dragged him outside, tears of blood on her young cheeks. As the orphans wept, Laila pulled Eclipse into the forest.
"Bad dog!" she said, dragging him as he yelped. "Bad Eclipse!" She hit the dog, anger burning inside her, tears in her eyes. "Mamma and Papa will kick us out of the house now. We finally had a home, and you had to ruin it."
She hit the dog again, then sobbed and embraced him, rocking him, weeping. "I'm sorry, Eclipse!" She had never cried so hard. "I'm sorry I hit you."
He gazed up at her with glassy eyes and did not move, and Laila realized for the first time that great strength filled her, greater than any child ever had, the strength of an archdemon or archangel. Eclipse, her dearest friend, was dead.
She howled into the sky that night, and tore down trees, and etched her claws along her arms and legs, drawing her mixed blood. She fled into the forests in terror, until she was lost in the darkness and wilderness, until the farm was miles behind and she could never again find it. She knew then, with a pall of blood that covered her eyes, that the demon inside her eclipsed the angel, that she was a being of light turned monstrous with fire. She knew that none were safe around her, and that she could never love again.
She would never make another friend, she swore. She was a monster, Laila knew, and she must keep herself in exile, away from any pet or human. Nobody was safe from her; not Mamma, not Papa, not children. In caves and riverbeds she lived, a creature covered in mud, hair draggled. She hunted wild boars and birds, and lived as a banished spirit with a dirty, bloody face, her clothes woven of leaves and fur, an outcast hunter.
"I am Laila!" she shouted into the forest sky, a bedraggled youth, a teenager with bat wings among the trees. "I curse you Heaven, and I curse you Hell. I am Laila, of the night, of shadows." She howled like a wolf, face covered with the blood of animals she hunted, halo flaming.